Well, now those are proper ways to balance shielding! Thinking outside the box really made the trick, you literally beat me to the issue that shields cost no energy when they are at full capacity. I'm still working on a sensitive approach to shielding curves, into something that makes sense and is easy. But energy, man! So close to nailing a fatal issue of the current shield system: No energy costs when they are at full capacity. Devs must hear that. It certainly is one step closer to fixing, and completing a game mechanic in the first place.
Ideas proposed here, from the visual feedback of shields and incrementing their interaction to more than just placing them and shooting them down, along with energy balancing of shields, is a more sensitive and thoughtful approach. (I pushed thrusters to much, perhaps, but all mechanics are connected, and power was what we certainly were missing). A ships generator or power storage should be the ultimate demise of any big ship since we have a hard cap: energy Regen. (See hard caps can bring good. which ones should be limited is the actual trick).
The approaches here are really good.
Sven's and Lord Chicken's idea about having 0% regen while being fired at, makes complete sense. Although it arises another question: How much DPS should a ship receive for this regen to reach 0% ? Definitely, a must to be considered into shielding. Regen itself holds the answer: the damage threshold of the ship is the combat regen we are now getting. I believe somewhere around 50% the full regen a ship gets, instantly depletes its regen and makes it 0%. But it ultimately allows for every ship to take out every other ship, assuming you can stay alive.
The idea of more feedback when combating shields, both in both eyes and ears, is great.
And the gem to this thread definitely is Energy balancing. Work has begun into showing comparisons of all of these figures. It is still, incomplete work, but a step forward into thoughtful balancing.
I know people already think here I am delusional and trolling, (which i find mighty offensive) and other things, but in the end, we came up with enough ideas to make a worthy contribution:
1.-Shields can't be balanced on a single number, much less in tank capacity by itself
2.- Feedback for players on how well they are doing against a ship will improve the experience by a lot.
3.- Energy balancing shields: make them actually demand an energy input equivalent (in proportion) to the amount of protection they give, forcing a ship to either limit the amount of shields it carries, to keep its other systems fully powered at all times, or carry enough energy in storage tanks to be able to battle at 100% for a limited time, then declining as the ships available power is effectively reduced, impacting both offense and defense, since more mass is used towards energy conservation than shielding and weapon systems.
Most of these solutions demand changes in ship construction. Are you willing to take such risks to see how can we balance things by thinking outside the box? I say we should try these all out. I'll provide friendly calculations, with all the things people requested here:
-Curves for shield scaling and comparisons with current shielding system - because you are reading this far to see them
- Comparisons vs current weapon damage, vs current energy costs for both shields and weapons
-Comparison vs proposed energy costs with different values and taking into account current energy per cube limitations.
-Comparison of all this against vanilla weapons dmg (only AMC's since all of them have the same DPS, supposedly, all weapons are equally worthy...or they will be balanced that way) and vs weapon damage specialized against shields on current values. Might add proposals there.
-I'd love to make mass calculations to add the final strike to balance. By giving equal mass to weapon and system components(hulls are another, simpler issue) we encourage people to do exactly whatever they want, since it would end up being the same in terms of movement to every other ship of the same volume,(mass/thrust relation dependent) if not better. If we touch this values, we can force to make more efficient ship designs. Reactors being the heaviest, then thrusters, then shields and weapons, we then make a clear preference: You ship needs to move, and movement is only second to power. Your ship should have weapons and shields, but it is still your choice which one to spend your power on. If we fine tune this values, and fine tune mass per shape and material, all ship designs get closer to the death cube in performance. The death will always be king, because it is a goddamn cube in a game of cubes, but the rest of the designs now stand much more of a chance.
Add that to all other proposals here (or not) and we are getting somewhere now.
